LEFT COAST BIAS: Virgin TV Stuck On Tarmac

Richard Branson’s Bad Luck with TV Continues as Virgin America Airlines’ Video System Fails

By Ben Grossman -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/31/2008 6:00:00 AM

Apparently, Richard Branson can’t get television in America right. When his 2004 Apprentice knockoff, The Rebel Billionaire, found ratings bankruptcy on Fox, you figured Branson couldn’t do any worse with TV.

That was until Virgin America Airlines.

Much like he boasted about his ill-fated reality show prior to its launch and quick demise, Branson has now been carrying on about his new airline, which is set to revolutionize the air-travel experience thanks in part to an in-seat entertainment system that includes 24 channels of live satellite television.

There’s only one problem: Much like Rebel Billionaire, this doesn’t work, either. I’ve now flown it four times, and the TV system has performed like Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez in a playoff game: zero-for-four.

For those of us who have to travel for business even periodically, the halcyon days of frequent flyers being treated like royalty are long-gone. So I divorced the airline I was married to and started flying JetBlue for one simple reason: The in-seat DirecTV helps with my second-grade-level attention span.

Cross-country jaunts go a lot better when you time the trip to catch a ballgame on ESPN and a nice What Not to Wear marathon over on A&E Network, because the same people would definitely be flipping back and forth between those two.

I love the original Virgin Atlantic, so when I heard that the new American version had Dish Network, I decided to give it a shot. I looked online last October and saw that its entertainment system had Fox, and I booked a trip at a time when I could watch a World Series game to pass the L.A.-to-New York flight.

It didn’t happen: The system was a clunker. I got exactly three channels for most of the trip.

So back to JetBlue I went. But this past February, that airline apparently forced some poor passenger to sit in the bathroom for most of a cross-country flight. If I want to be treated like that, I could just spend an afternoon with the wife.

So seven months after my first try, I decided to give Virgin a few more chances. Figuring that they must have worked out the kinks and knowing that ESPN2 was definitely one of their live channels, I rolled the dice and scheduled a recent afternoon flight during the telecast of the European Champions League soccer final. In simple terms, that’s the Super Bowl for soccer teams for all of Europe -- a big deal for a fùtbol zealot like myself.

I settled into my seat and fired up the old system just before kickoff. I was greeted with a nice big error message that might as well have read: “Sucker.” I didn’t plug in my earphones, but I’d bet there would have been a clown voice laughing at me -- or Branson’s voice.

The system actually did kick in about halfway through the game, and then proceeded to crash three more times over the next 45 minutes. Only my aversion to incarceration kept my inner hooligan from using my foot to let the screen know exactly what I thought of the situation.

So why did I keep coming back? For one thing, Virgin does have in-seat power, meaning that you can work on your laptop the entire flight. And that actually functions as advertised.

An airline rep told me that they are trying to get things worked out and that reliability numbers are actually up. Obviously, I can’t vouch for that, so I’ll have to trust them there.

Everyone is talking about how you can watch television virtually anywhere you want these days. Apparently I have found the one place that is not the case: Virgin America.

So I’m probably going back to JetBlue from now on. You may have to sit in the toilet for half the flight, but at least you can watch someone’s live TV screen if you keep the door open wide enough.